On the functional aspects of prayer:
It need not be connected to a religion at all. In fact, that might help. Either way, it's a powerful, meditative process through which you work through problems, building musculature for introspection.
That musculature is ideology agnostic.
It need not be connected to a religion at all. In fact, that might help. Either way, it's a powerful, meditative process through which you work through problems, building musculature for introspection.
That musculature is ideology agnostic.
So people who have no daily practice building their muscles for active reflection during which they piece together thoughts, feelings, values, experiences, and observed reality to locate clean throughlines of coherence will always be weaker than those who do work out every day.
Prayer is essentially cross-fit for mental, physical, spiritual, and political integration, God or none.
To look down on it when you've no experience with it is to mark yourself a fool with an arrogant mind closed to potentially beneficial experiences or practices sight unseen.
To look down on it when you've no experience with it is to mark yourself a fool with an arrogant mind closed to potentially beneficial experiences or practices sight unseen.
It is far less important what we call it or who we credit for it; people simply must understand why prayer is addictive in the same way running is. There exists a prayer high where after going for a while, everything falls into place. Once you've tasted that, you never forget it.
So maybe it needs a different name. Alignment sessions? Idk. A re-brand. A divorce from religions. No idea.
But it's fucking stupid to look down on practices of prayer or meditation, even if, or especially if you are an atheist or agnostic with no exposure to spontaneous prayer.
But it's fucking stupid to look down on practices of prayer or meditation, even if, or especially if you are an atheist or agnostic with no exposure to spontaneous prayer.
If you have political goals that you care about, consider prayers, or, if that word's associations w/ religions bothers you, focused alignment sessions that you dedicate to synthesizing, unscripted, everything that is working and everything that isn't with your hopes and dreams.
If you bring honesty to it, a naked courage, awareness, and presence to all that matters during sessions, you may find unprecedented openness, attention, insight, mourning, healing, joy, empathy, patience, humility, and resolve to tend to the unglamorous details of mortal life.
If nuclear warheads are weapons of mass destruction, daily sessions of spontaneous alignment of self, spirit, and society are weapons of mass creation. It's self-defeating to leave such power in the exclusive province of political enemies who accidentally access it through faith.
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